ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Adding and Modifying Data

5.0. Introduction

This chapter focuses on issues related to adding and editing, and persisting data changes to the data source. An overview of some of the topics in this chapter follows.

ADO.NET provides an autoincrementing column type that generates a unique value for each new row. There is no mechanism to ensure that the values are unique from the values produced by other users. Recipe 5.1 shows how to use autoincrementing columns to ensure that the values generated by different users do not conflict.

SQL Server has an identity column that is also an autoincrementing column type. This value is used rather than the ADO.NET autoincrement column type when adding new records; there is no automatic way to keep these values synchronized after new rows in a DataTable have been inserted into a SQL Server table. Recipe 5.2 shows you how to synchronize the DataTable to the values in the database. Recipe 5.3 shows you how to synchronize these values with a Microsoft Access database.

Oracle does not support autoincrement columns but rather uses a sequence, that is, a procedure that generates a series of unique values. Recipe 5.4 shows how to synchronize autoincrementing columns in a DataTable with Oracle sequence values after a row has been inserted into an Oracle database.

Recipe 5.8 shows how to add master-detail records to a DataSet where the primary key of the parent table is an autoincrementing column.

A Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) is a 128-bit integer ...